 | Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought: Digitalized Dilemmas of Automated Governance and Communitarian Practice Subjects: Built Environment; Computer Science; Economics Finance Business & Industry; Geography; Information Science; Language & Literature; Politics & International Relations; Social Sciences; Urban Studies; Artificial Intelligence; Human Geography; Information Technology; Politics & Technology; Urban Communications & Technology; Architecture; Business Management and Accounting; Language & Linguistics; Sociology & Social Policy; Digital Architecture; Management of Technology & Innovation; Cultural Geography; Economic Geography; Political Geography; Social Geography; Development Geography; Planning - Human Geography; Population Geography; Regional Geography - Human Geography; Geographical Thought; Sociology of Science & Technology; Language and Communication; Political Sociology; Social Policy; This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and digital-era automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, prompting a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs. The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous socio-technical milieux, arguing that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through community-based peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens. This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences. Nancy Ettlinger is a professor in the Geography department at The Ohio State University. She is an academic researcher and has co-authored 50 publications. Her research interest includes critical human geography, digital economy and culture, technology and change, governance of neoliberal life, poststuctural theory and epistemology. |
